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How does the US use water?

construction-physics.com

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Re: How does the US use water?

#161

Post by hombre_fatal »

ryandrake wrote: post #58
jeffbee wrote: post #6

What a great article. Definitely bookmarking this for reference. People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. The last couple of charts really highlight that trend. Something else worth considering is that many uses…

> People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family h…

Dense infra is easier and cheaper to build and maintain than inherently sprawling single family infra where you lay down a lot of material and fixed costs just to service each single home and the infra between them.

The tax base you have per meter of sprawling single family infra doesn't even necessarily cover the maintenance. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-...

And "build moar housing" trivially entails "and the infra to go with it". You're making the opposite mistake by assuming that the solution we already have is somehow better and more affordable only by the virtue that we currently have it which would only make sense if there was no maintenance needed.

Re: How does the US use water?

#162

Post by aidenn0 »

I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns?

We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.

Re: How does the US use water?

#163

Post by aidenn0 »

adrr wrote: post #139
recallingmemory wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, 1.6 trillion gallons of water from the Colorado river goes into irrigation for alfalfa[1]. Google's total water consumption across all data centers in 2023 was 6.4 billion gallons[2]. People are sounding the alarm about water usage in AI data centers while ignoring the real unsustainable industries like animal agriculture. 1: https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-w... 2: https://www.datacent…

Talking about wasteful. There 16,000 golf courses that use 312,000 gallons a day[1]. Thats 1.82 trillion gallons annually. Only 28 million people play golf course on a course. Google's MAU is 90%+ of US population, beef or milk consumptions i would guess that 90% of population consumes it at least once a month. We're focusing on things that everyone uses but the things that less than 10% of the populations partake in…

I'm mildly surprised that almost 10% of the US golfs. That makes the 0.3% of water usage from TFA seem less bad.

Re: How does the US use water?

#164

Post by hearsathought »

aidenn0 wrote: post #162

I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns? We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.

> I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns?

I'd assume so. Would be interesting to see the water usage comparison between city dwellers and suburbanites.

Re: How does the US use water?

#165

Post by celestialcheese »

adrr wrote: post #19
newfocogi wrote: post #8

I found a lot of value in this article. Out of frustration with people who are alarmist over how much water a datacenter "consumes" compared to households, I've probably erred too often towards: 'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can…

Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course. How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.

nit: Nestle sold off it's water brands in 2021 to a private equity group.[0][1]

0 - https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/05/09/nestle-to-s... 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2Bas81NDY

Re: How does the US use water?

#166

Post by morleytj »

aidenn0 wrote: post #162

I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns? We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.

Lawns use such an incredible amount of water, particularly people maintaining them in deserts, like in Arizona and parts of California. It boggles my mind that people go out of their way to put so much effort and resources just into having grass in front of their house that they mostly don't use.

Re: How does the US use water?

#167

Post by rconti »

aidenn0 wrote: post #162

I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns? We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.

yeah, our small suburban house in silicon valley can easily use 400 gallons per day on days where we water the small front and back lawns and drip irrigation, but on a non-watering day, we can use as little as 50 gallons for 2 people.

While this is "a lot" of water, when we've had an irrigation leak in a zone that runs for 5 or 10 minutes, the number can balloon to 900 gallons in a day.

The amount of water used by people who actually don't closely monitor and track their usage, with big properties, lots of plants and lawn to irrigate, must be truly mind-boggling. I wouldn't be surprised if tens of thousands of gallons per day was pretty common at a lot of houses.

Re: How does the US use water?

#168

Post by rconti »

morleytj wrote: post #166
aidenn0 wrote: post #162

I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns? We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.

Lawns use such an incredible amount of water, particularly people maintaining them in deserts, like in Arizona and parts of California. It boggles my mind that people go out of their way to put so much effort and resources just into having grass in front of their house that they mostly don't use.

Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.

Re: How does the US use water?

#169

Post by rconti »

evantbyrne wrote: post #38
bob1029 wrote: post #2

> Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable. In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.

Where do you live? I don't think I've ever lost water without a power outage.

I've never lost water, period, and I've had multi-day power outages.

Re: How does the US use water?

#170

Post by rconti »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #94
adrr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orange County California does the same. Injects treated wastewater back into the aquifer. Largest toilet to tap system in the world.

"Toilet to Tap" would be a great name for a California brewpub.

My local brewery made a beer out of recycled water. It's not legal to sell, though.

https://www.devilscanyon.com/epic-onewater-brew.html

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